Nice view titled Miletus, from steel engraving with fine detail and clear impression, approx. size with margins is 26.5 x 19 cm. Print was published in Meyer's Universum by Bibliographic Institute Hildburghausen Germany.

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Miletus,

Byzantine PALATION, Turkish BALAT, ancient Greek city of western Anatolia, south of the present city of Söke, Turkey. Before the Ionian Greek migration it was inhabited by Carians. The Greek city traced its foundation to Neleus and his followers from Pylos. It was the natural outlet for products from the interior of Anatolia and had a considerable wool trade with Sybaris, in southern Italy. Miletus played an important role in the founding of the Greek colony of Naukratis in Egypt and founded more than 60 colonies on the shores of the Black Sea, including Abydos, Cyzicus, Sinope, Olbia, and Panticapaeum.

Before 500 BC, Miletus was the greatest Greek city in the east. In addition to its commerce and colonization, the city was distinguished for its literary and scientific-philosophical figures, among them Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Hecataeus. Together with the people of the other two Ionian cities of Caria, Myus and Priene, the Milesians spoke a distinctive Ionian dialect. Little is known about Milesian government before 500 BC. At the beginning and end of the 6th century BC, however, the city was ruled by the tyrants Thrasybulus and Histiaeus.

During the 7th century, Miletus came into conflict with the neighbouring state of Lydia and probably acknowledged Lydian overlordship in the mid-6th century. In the latter part of the 6th century, it came under Persian rule, along with the other Greek cities of Anatolia. About 499 BC the Milesians led the Ionian revolt that marked the beginning of the Greco-Persian Wars (q.v.). The city was stormed and sacked by the Persians in 494. After the Persian defeat by the Greeks (479), Miletus joined the Athenian-dominated Delian League; but by the mid-5th century it was weakened and impoverished by internal divisions and in 442 was defeated in war by neighbouring Samos.

Its fortunes soon revived, however, and the Milesians set about rebuilding their city on a new grid plan of the type invented in this period by Hippodamus of Miletus. In 412 the city sided with Sparta against Athens; before 350 Mausolus of Caria ruled it, and it fell to Alexander in 334 after a siege. Hellenistic rulers who competed for influence at Miletus included the Seleucid Antiochus IV Epiphanes and Eumenes II of Pergamum, both about 170 BC. It retained its commercial importance and received special attention from the Roman emperors Augustus and Trajan. By the 6th century AD, however, its two harbours had silted up, and it was eventually abandoned.

The ruins occupy the former peninsula extending northward from the hill of Kalabak Tepe. The area covered by the archaic city is unknown. Only one temple, from the 6th century BC, survives in part on Kalabak Tepe. To the south there are extensive remains of the classical city from the 5th century BC to Roman imperial times. The Hellenistic council house has some of the earliest known examples of true pilasters.

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